British values: democracy and respect must also apply to the way curriculum is built

Denis Healey tells the story. On the eve of South Yemen’s independence, its last British governor hosted a party attended by Healey, who was then minister for defence. Over drinks, as the flag was about to be lowered, the governor looked at Healey and said, “You know, Minister, I believe that in the long view of history, the British Empire will be remembered only for two things.” What, Healey wondered, were these great gifts to the world? And the governor replied, “the game of association football. And the expression ‘eff off’.”

Stories like this are a reminder, perhaps, that ‘British values’ are more complex and problematic than they appear when grabbed by politicians in a crisis. On Monday afternoon, following the OFSTED report into Birmingham schools, the Secretary of State for Education argued that all schools should be required to teach the fundamental British values of “democracy, mutual respect and tolerance”.

The relationship between the school curriculum and civic understanding – which is what is at issue here – has been fraught from the very beginnings of the National Curriculum. A subject-based curriculum has many strengths, but there are aspects which fall through the cracks. The 1988 National Curriculum addressed this through a series of ‘cross-curricular themes’ (though they were taken more seriously by curriculum developers than they ever were in schools). What is everyone’s responsibility is no-one’s real responsibility. In 1989, the then Speaker of the House of Commons, Bernard Weatherill, established a Speaker’s Commission on Citizenship. In 1993, OFSTED took a different tack, seeking to define social, moral and spiritual understanding, but covering much of the same ground. In 1997 the new Labour Secretary of State for Education, David Blunkett, asked his fomer university politics tutor, Bernard Crick – a lifelong advocate of political education – to report on the case for education for citizenship. The current Prime Minister and Michael Gove would do well to re-read Crick’s report.

Crick set out three aims for education for citizenship, including social and moral responsibility, requiring morally responsible behaviour both in and beyond the classroom, both towards those in authority and towards each other, community involvement, including learning through community involvement and service to the community, and political literacy, including pupils learning about and how to make themselves effective in public life through knowledge, skills and values.

Crick argued that whilst these were cross-curricular concerns, the knowledge base for citizenship required a dedicated allocation of curricular time, and Citizenship was introduced as a statutory element of the curriculum in 2002. It was abolished by the Coalition in 2010 under the banner of offering schools curriculum freedom.

In his own Newsnight interview on 9 June, the Chief Inspector of Schools, pushed by Jeremy Paxman, said that on the curriculum he personally leaned towards curriculum prescription. It is almost certain that we will now have a new round of consultation, which will throw up many of the definitional challenges involved in translating ‘British values’ into curriculum guidance, in which the list of elements of British values will grow and shrink over time and end up not a million miles away from the Crick Report.

In the most recent edition of the Curriculum Journal, my IOE colleague Michael Young, himself a key advocate of the importance of knowledge-led curricula, offers some astringent and prescient arguments on what a curriculum can, and cannot do: it can educate young people, but cannot, ultimately, reach beyond the school. The evidence of the past is quite clear. Politicians frequently overstate what the curriculum can do. They push definitions too far; they burden curricula with too many expectations.

Teachers and schools need guidance, but the guidance needs to be generic and to support professional judgement. If “democracy, mutual respect and tolerance” are the (British) values we want children to be taught, then they apply equally to the processes by which curricula are constructed. If that’s not the case, then schools and teachers are just as likely to draw on at least one of the long-lasting influences of Empire cited by the last governor of South Yemen.

8 comments on “British values: democracy and respect must also apply to the way curriculum is built”

We do seem to go around in circles don’t we. Bernard was a funny old stick, and his report was specifically designed for David Blunkett, but it was good enough to stand the test of time – or be reinvented.

In my experience, only two things drive what children learn in school: what is being assessed; and what the staff of the school feel and believe. I would back most teachers I know to deliver on core British values but by their actions, not because it’s been grafted on to the curriculum. However, they would be able to do this better if they weren’t shooting at moving goalposts all the time and killing themselves trying to match their SoW and exam specification choices to whichever change has just made the last version obsolete. If Conservative ministers really want schools to promote core British values, as opposed to core Conservative values, all they need do is provide the space for teachers to teach.

A few weeks ago I hosted an official from the Dutch Education Ministry at BFI Southbank . We looked in at the Mediatheque where a group were watching films and he asked ‘So I guess you use this to teach about tolerance, freedom and democracy’. I was a bit flummoxed. We support what teachers ask for; they never ask us for this. Why not?

Gove withdraws Citizenship from the National Curriculum, or allows academies to operate entirely outside it. Then he insists on putting something called British values back in. Most of the teachers I know find this degree of meddling tiresome and will just ignore him. Perhaps that is a Britjsh value in itself: curmudgeonliness.

The interesting thing about ‘teaching’ values (whatever ones we choose as ‘British’) is measurement. How do we measure the extent to which the desired values are activated and reinforced in a school’s formal and informal curriculum? Is this a job for OFSTED? Are our inspectors sufficiently qualified or trained to make a judgement on the extent to which values such as empathy, kindness, tolerance, respect, compassion, equality, openess to change, or which ever other values we feel are worth activating and reinforcing? It would be reasonably straightforward to analyse the values the National Curriculum activates and reinforces. Assessing the same thing for a school, as a whole, is a wholly more complex thing and inevitably subject to the value judgements of each assessor. It is, nevertheless, still a very worthwhile exercise for a school, just as it is for any institution, organisation or business. The degree to which I, for one, am drawn to engage with any entity is strongly swayed by both the values it is purporting to hold and the values it is observably living. Imagine if a school was able to publically and explicitly state that an independent assessment had shown that the school is successfully activating and reinforcing kindness, care, creativity, democracy, tolerance, respect, inquisitiveness and compassion while actively inhibiting narcissism, image obsession, selfishness, power, inequality, materialism and submission to authority. I’d be pretty keen to work at such a school.